Embracing ‘Slow’
All aboard the chemo go-slow train! It’s one of the most frustrating (but comical, apparently) side effects – chemo brain fog. I was told at the beginning of treatment that my ability to think, multi-task, focus on details, remember stuff, was basically going to be on the ‘wish list’ for a while. That instead, chemo causes the brain to malfunction a tad. My panicked face was because I surely need to do all those things for a living!
But these days, I ‘wear’ a banana, rather than ‘eat’ one. I write my birth date on consent forms, rather than today’s date. I announce that I’m at the chemo clinic for taxidermy, rather than taxol (the name of the drug)… that one had the nurses in stitches.
I’m now embracing it like everything else about chemo – a chemically-imposed trial of SLOW. There are books written about it and workshops and experts teaching us how to de-clutter our lives and, by extension, our heads. It’s about moving slowly, eating slowly, breathing slowly, and thinking slowly so that we all have more time to reflect and ponder and immerse ourselves in the present.
While it is a confronting thing to be shooting blanks at the most basic of conversational times, I am trying to see it also as a way of my brain (and body) taking some well-earned long service leave from what has otherwise been more than 20 years of frantic busyness where my brain didn’t know how to switch off and just ‘be’. I sometimes wonder whether it was an inconvenient truth to not want to do it either.
Becoming disconnected from the world of emails and meetings and ‘busy’ has made me start to ponder how, in a world of instant connection (with devices), that we are so disconnected (with people).
In among the many not-so-great things with this year of diagnosis and treatment, I have been gifted with Time. It can feel like pure self-indulgence. I then question whether I should be doing something more constructive like solving world hunger than going for a walk to my local coffee shop and talking to random people. But selfishness is not a dirty word for me anymore. It’s instead another word for self-preservation.
When I see someone now getting lost in the excitement of their phone’s notifications, I want to scream “Just look up!” You never know who or what you might see right in front of your face. There’s sunlight. Trees. Birds. A big blue sky. Oh, and those unknown scary creatures called people. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a moment of connection with something that doesn’t require a battery recharge.
I see it with kids too, where ‘fun’ becomes the conjoined twin to smart TVs, playstations, and wifi. What about a 5 minute walk to the beach. The wildnerness. The wonderment. The “why” of life.
So I’m going to enjoy riding the go-slow train. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever get off it. It’s time to welcome some empty space into my head so that I can make more room for new stuff, new friends, new experiences, new dreams, new perspective. And ultimately, a new life.
